NIN & Donders 2025

At the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience we collaborate with many research groups both inside and outside of the borders of our tiny country. We have a special relationship however with the neuroscientific institute at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. The Donders Institute and the NIN may not be the closest geographically speaking (1,5 hour by train, which is long here in the Netherlands), but they are thematically and in terms of friendships.

This is exactly why the NIN-Donders days were set up: a day in which researchers from both institutes get together to showcase their scientific projects and findings, and to chat about possible future collaborations. This year, the NIN hosted the meeting and researchers from Nijmegen joined us a the institute. The day consisted of blitz talks by young researchers, followed by poster sessions and two key-note talks at the very end.

I decided to present a poster about the Brain HelpDesk, a science communication platform that I’m running together with researchers from the Donders Institute. It was a great way to demonstrate how we try to communicate scientific findings with the public in an interactive way! I think I was able to convince some of my fellow scientists to contribute in our quest to engage the public in thinking about thinking (and the brain).

Guido Meijer from the Donders Institute talking about his neuroscientific work on the hippocampus and spatial memory